In general, the present invention relates to an electronic-equipment control apparatus, an electronic-equipment control method and an electronic-equipment control system. In particular, the present invention relates to an electronic-equipment control apparatus, an electronic-equipment control method and an electronic-equipment control system which allow a plurality of pieces of electronic equipment at home to be combined into an integrated single system.
In recent years, personal computers (also referred to hereafter simply as PCs for the sake of convenience) are getting popular also at home as well at the office. By using a personal computer and a modem, a data base and a network can be accessed from a home through an ordinary public telephone line in order to search for certain data or enjoy so-called PC communication.
In addition, particularly in the U. S. A., with the popularization of coaxial and optical-fiber cables, a cable company can provide a special decoder (or a set-top box), allowing services such as videos on demand and viewer participation programs taking advantage of bi-directional capabilities to be rendered.
However, a variety of such conventional home apparatuses (or pieces of home electronic equipment) are connected as individual units. To be more specific, the telephone line is connected to a modem directly while a cable is connected directly to a decoder for example. As a result, in the case of a home in which a plurality of personal computers exist, for example, communication among the personal computers must be carried out through an external network. On the top of that, video data received by a decoder can only be recorded in a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) of the system. As a result, in order to process the received video data by means of a personal computer, another special apparatus is thus required, giving rise to a problem that it is difficult to utilize a number of apparatuses as a single integrated system.
An AV (Audio Video) system has been proposed wherein a plurality of pieces of AV equipment are connected by using an AV bus to form a single integrated system. However, only the so-called AV equipment can be connected to the system. It is difficult to include electronic equipment such as personal computer which has characteristics different from the AV equipment in the system.